The Lesson Of E.Coli

E. Coli is a very tiny microorganism known as a bacteria. It is 2-4 microns long, with about 9 x 10 to the power of 10 atoms. It's a tiny thing relative to the human being, itself made of eukaryotic cells, which are much larger than bacteria (about 10 times larger); plus, were made of around 50-75 trillion of these cells. Trillion.

Yet what I want to make known to the reader is what this wondrous little bacterium can accomplish.



As you can see in the above picture, the E. Coli bacteria moves through a strange little protein appendage called flagella.

What I want the reader to imagine is how this dynamical system operates. The membrane is made of phospholipids, embedded in which are specific types of protein receptor that detect electromagnetic frequencies in the environment. Understand here the magic of the bacteria self-organized responsivity: somehow, a glucose molecule, hundreds or thousands of microns away, can be detected by the E. Coli's protein receptors, and via its acute sensitivity, transmit this message to the flagella, which alter their angle of movement to cohere with the perceptual sensitivity of the protein receptors on the cell.

I call this process "magic", because of the acute state of coupling between the organism and its immediate surround. All around this organism lie different frequencies that are more or less treated as noise to the E.Coli system, with only specific frequencies - glucose, or lactose, or galactose, - titillating this systems mechanisms.

Following detection, natural selection i.e. external influences, determine genetic-protein-metabolism dynamics via the distribution of protein receptor types on the membrane, and the corresponding genetic expression within the cell itself.

The idea that Human beings are at the center of creation seems astonishing, almost implausible - yet look at the perceptual capacities - the subtlety of the signal detection in this tiny bacteria, somehow "knowing" where the sugar molecule lies, and moving itself towards it.

Human-World Symbiosis

This is probably where science is going to go. Just as trees have now been discovered to share nutrients with members of the same species - acting according to an astonishing egalitarian "ethic" - so too are humans connected at a non-verbal, affective, and analogical level which renders us essentially the same. Just as trees "shoot out" from the ground, appearing to external observers as legitimate individuals, at a lower level, the genetic relatedness between trees i.e. trees of the same species, communicate and share nutrients with one another, indicating a larger system at the root level which "bifurcates" into individual trees at the surface level.

Humans are this as well. What is called the "ego", or a the first person orientedness of knowing that you know, of being a self with a constant "line of identity", beneath this line, or "cut", is an actual network of structural relations between human beings - primarily - and the semiotic structures of the world we live within and around.

Semiosis is the study of signs, and for Humans, this means "inner" and "outer" signs. Signs from the body, and signs from the environment. The two systems evolved together, with the external signs i.e. "strawberries", eliciting an internal sign i.e. "sweetness", within brain dynamics (i.e. genetically encoded). The in between states of desire for strawberries (imagined) is a sign of the strawberries ontological power over the human system: it proposes, eventually, the quality of "sweetness", through a process called "hypostatic abstraction", whereby the immediate taste and pleasure of sweetness becomes "strawberries possess the property of sweetness". Strawberries inspire i.e. impose themselves, along with other sweet tasting things, into the human imagination, thereby making the clear the ontological category of sweetness. Our existential and spiritual lives, in effect, remain ontologically tethered to the physical environment which instigated the formation of these existential qualities.

The future of science - the science of emergence - is fundamentally the science of natural meaning. This should be exciting, and probably more than anything else, awe-inspiring, as we begin to recognize an ancient truth, a truth that, from todays cultural alienation, would be felt as overwhelming to the mind, as the state itself constitutes the emergent response of the spirit of todays age, "commenting" on the realities being discovered by the sciences.

Biosemiotics, or even, biopoetics, may even be able to read the story of creation, life, and being, in a way that scarcely feels real - although in its logicality, in its clarity, will ignite a profound sense of the "surreal" - that the world speaks, and that we, the center of it all, are babbling about, failing to recognize that we are naturally - and most healthily - alive when experiencing ourselves in proper connection to the natural world.

The Future

I see a future where humanity comes to realize that nature herself - the trees that arise within her, produce an electromagnetic frequency that, fractally speaking, is consonant with our own.

This is because all cells - i.e. trees, their branches, leaves, as well as the smaller plants of the forest, are constructed around the TCA cycle, also known as the citrus acid cycle.

This feedback loop, present in almost all living things, is so prevalent that the famous biophysicist Harold Morowitz called it an "ecosystem property". In electromagnetic terms, this is significant, as this cycle is the most reduced common referent in living processes, which may imply that living processes may couple or synchronize their phase-space in such a way as to maximize information transfer within and between them.

It's not just an arbitrary thought, but true, and true because we evolved and thrived best when living in forests, around the trees, and perhaps, in the trees. The presence of living processes around us affected the electromagnetic frequencies of the surrounding 'empty-space', bringing certain organisms into a quasi-entrainment with one another.

Again: our naming is not just a mental process, but an electromagnetic inter-penetration between our human organic system (body), and the objects of the world, whose "dicisign'" - or "dynamical object" - incorporates its spiritual presence into our psyche through a process of non-conceptual intimation of its presence - which compels, in the intuiting mind of the observer, an indexing, and naming of the object.

This picture is monistic. Externality is defined by electromagnetic frequencies which operate between systems that contain a similar referent (TCA cycle metabolism) within their cellular dynamics; internally, a phenomenology of being and consciousness emerges which operates automatically and deterministically, or, with consciousness, with indeterminism, and therefore, a power degree of semiotic freedom.

Cute little guys. They are alright unless they decide to bite when we are still alive. After I die, I wouldn't care if they turned me into topsoil.

a reply to: Astrocyte

E Coli. is a world wide problem and governments say this is not a serious illness, why most receive no government retirement benefits prior to being 62 years old.

My daughter almost died from this disease and it came from poop in the drinking water.

It is a fact if you drink water with feces in it, you will get E. Coli.

Many water supply companies around the world have frequent sewer issues where it gets in the drinking water. I believe it is a large scandal....

Stop cooking and drinking tap water....today it is clean....tomorrow for a few hours poop running through the lines....then back to clean...

Sadly your fantasies of the future will be halted by evil powers. They know our connection to the Earth, and are actively destroying that connection. Civilization after civilization. They keep trying to fund and build up something artificial to survive natural cataclysm, but I ask you, what came first? The solution, or the problem? Nature always wins in the end, but its not pretty from a domesticated point of view.

I always try to make time to go barefoot whenever and wherever possible, usually in my backyard, so as to have that natural physical and spiritual connection to nature and the frequencies of our Mother Earth. However, as I live in a City, there is much interference from every which way, but I do manage to get a tickle now and again.